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Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google, has joined VMWare and Cisco to give $8.5 million in Class C funding to Puppet Labs, the Portland-based maker of a virtualization tool.

Not only are the three investing in Puppet Labs, they are all customers. Puppet Labs is the creator of Puppet, an enterprise cloud tool that essentially lets IT managers automate any repeatable task in the data center virtually -- meaning unattended. Puppet Labs released Puppet Enterprise earlier this year and says that demand is "outstripping" their resources, according to founder Luke Kanies.

Puppet Labs' list of customers is impressive, ranging from Stanford University (alma mater of both Google founders) to Zynga, to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Although the tool may be too geeky for regular folks to grasp, virtualization tools are a necessity for today's system administrators -- especially when they get called up at 3 a.m. in San Francisco to fix a system problem in Hong Kong.

Puppet is hot right now and Google has to be part of the action because virtualization is the future. We would also not be surprised if Google attempted to buy the company and hire the team that created it.